Illustration: A happy girl is flying in the blue sky with wings of freedom!
What is Freedom?
Where to Find Guidelines: How to Be Confident of Being Right?
Have you ever thought about what is out-of-fashion yet the most 'trending' and 'evergreen' in this world?
It is the 'Holy Book'!
It is
Where We Go Wrong: 2 Cases to Brainstorm!
- When You Seek Help of People Around You
- When You Follow Your Instinct with the Faith of God
When the situations are adverse, people around you tend to give you advice and make you realize that your decisions, dreams, ideas, and even you had been wrong. It makes you drop your dreams, confidence, joy, and inner peace and freedom. Failure in a job or relationship, poverty, illness, or any other prolonged situation! Such scenarios lead us to lower self-confidence, addictions, and the pain of hopelessness.
When friends, relatives, medicines, and efforts fail, the Godly words preserve, refuel, rebuild, refresh, and revive. And most importantly, they never fail. They absorb the negativity, break the shells, cut the ties, lighter the weight, and keep you free and your spark lit.
Significance of a Holy Book: 4 Facts We Underestimate!
- It Doesn't Let You Get Lost
- Restores the Confidence
- Liberates You Against the Worldly Oppression
- Keeps You Ready and Preserved in 'Every' Situation
The Holy Book teaches you to have faith in your wings, dreams, and decisions. It strengthens you to believe in yourself no matter what. Simultaneously, it keeps you on the right, righteous, easy, and straight path.
It keeps your confidence that if you are right, on a righteous path, and doing good, then the end results of any situation are going to be good.
The world, people, and life's situations are oppressing. The only liberator that can make you learn to breathe freely and happily in all situations is the 'Word of God'. Only they can give you the 'Real Inner Freedom'. A hooly Book has an amazing guideline of standards. It has key solutions for all types of situations.
Read, inculcate, and enjoy that to find you peace and joy.
Life is a roller-coaster ride. The situations come without alarming you. You might be successful or fail; you might fly or fall; you might feel too happy or too sad. But the Word of God will always give you peace, joy, and positivity to keep going with a hopeful heart, and eventually will take you to your destination.
Whatever situation you face, that will preserve your inner freedom and you will never lose your wings and energy to stand again and fly.
Inner Freedom: The Truth One Achieves after Taking a Lifetime Experience
Inner Freedom is a state of-
- Awareness of our presence as God's creation
- Oneness, expansion, and ultimate joy in God and His creations (be it our surroundings, nature, people, or other living beings around)
- Realization of our real goal for which we are been sent into this world
- Being courageous in following that real goal
- Being unconditioned by the outer circumstances or their oppression.
7 Inner Freedom Eaters: Encounter the Bugging Issues!
Let’s say peek-a-boo to all 7 issues that play 7 inner freedom eaters!
Let's remove them from the root which stops us from being ourselves, being free, being real, and breaks the bounding shells with the 'Word of God'!
Infected Value System
An Eye-opener
“Freedom lays in following the value system.”
In our childhood, we are taught the ethics, values, and the ideal way to live a life. Until we grow from a kid to a mature person, we keep learning from our family, education, environment, and experiences about what is right and what is wrong. Simultaneously, we learn to fit as per our surroundings. This all builds the foundation of our principles, values, and behavioral tendencies. Gradually our value system becomes an integral part of our life.
Where we learn to live an ideal life, the situations start to lay tests, breakers, and bumpy rides. The reality of life comes into existence. Here we start to trade our inner freedom for short-time gains by changing ourselves.
Sometimes it is good to be adaptable to change, but other times it might change the core of you too. If you change your definition or basics of freedom, don’t forget to ensure the safety of your inner being.
What Happens Actually? 7 Facts We Don't Realize
- Deviated Values Reflect on Actions
- Why We Trade Our Inner Freedom?
- What We Lose?
- Whom We Trade?
- When We Compromise?
- Where We Go Wrong?
- How We Get Trapped?
Our value system designs the nature of our actions because our actions perform in our value system’s circumference. When this base is corrupted or infected because of situations or others, one starts to bind his or her inner being and real identity. It leads one towards wrong addictions, adultery, temptations, and imprisonment.
No one is a born liar, failure, drunkard, thief, killer, or destroyer. The unfulfilled desires, ambitions, and search for worldly pleasures make one trade their inner freedom. Unrighteousness opens the gates of the dark. One doesn't get to know when and where the keys of peace and joy got lost. Even if one knows, he denies seeing that and chooses blindness. The value system remains in the subconscious mind and keeps alarming but one denies hearing.
Self-awareness, confidence, hopes, and innocence because the basic roots know the truth. The wrong keeps eating one from inside.
The dark world that swallows your bright.
When we stop seeing and listening to the truth, we start to enjoy false pleasures. After becoming baseless and hopeless, one starts to become what he is not. One compromises oneself.
When we leave the hand of our roots, value system, and basic standard guidelines, we go wrong because when our base goes, there are more chances to fall.
Gradually one gets addicted to wrong habits, sorrow, pain, and false joys. Addiction doesn't allow one to come out and make a new beginning. Sometimes a friend circle of the same type of people also doesn't allow you to choose the right path.
What to Do?
Make the evergreen Word of God the light of your feet and lamp to your path. Don't let anyone else set your standards. Remember that if you are good, clean, righteous, clutter-free, and on a straight path, then the universe will also give the same back to you. So the heart and yourself clean and proceed ahead keeping yourself lighter, without baggage. Maintain the positivity and leave the rest on God. Take His weight and give your weight to Him because His weight is lighter. And live free after that.
- Why Believe in God?
- Go Back to Your Roots
Because He never lies. If His words say that following His commandments and living a righteous life gives you deliverance, it is the truth. When one takes the burden of fulfilling His commandments, He preserves that person and makes his ways easy and smooth, removing the stones from the path.
When we make changes in that system forcefully because of the circumstances or people, it somewhere starts to bind us in a shell. So don't make your own out-of-the-box value system as per the convenience because it will bind you in hopelessness, baselessness, and pain.
“Freedom is how you encounter and confront your limits that are set and circumscribed by your value system.” (-One more in-depth insight)
It is real freedom where you can follow your roots, righteousness, and that easy path.
Tiring and Tearing Challenges
Daily Challenges: Changes and New Beginnings
There are many new events that take place in our day-to-day life. Such as:
- Raising a child
- Making space among friends
- Dealing with haters
- A new beginning of life after marriage
- A new beginning in a job
- New class
- New home
- New city, and so on.
They all associate new challenges with them.
Some deal with them graciously and they pass. Others who are not adaptable to change find themselves in trouble and get irritated. Sometimes they find shortcuts or wrong ways too which become serious issues later on, taking the inner peace away.
How to Cope with Undealt Situations?
One must deal patiently and graciously in such situations. Follow the below steps:
- Halt
- Analyze
- Learn
- Step ahead
- Keeping the calm at the place and witness the silently-shaping 'change'.
Trials: Destiny and Experiences
Uncontrollable Situations
There are people who don't believe in God and His grace. Some think that money can change destiny. Some also think that destiny is nothing. Let's brain-still on some life situations and states that are as follows:
- The state of illness, mental sickness, or any disorder
- Loneliness
- Homelessness
- The feeling of an orphan
- Brocken heart or relationship
- Joblessness
- Staying unmarried without a family
- Barrenness
- The trauma of getting divorced
- The loss of a spouse
Your freedom is defined as per whatever set of rules or values; it is re-adjusted and re-defined by many happenings on which we don’t have direct control such as death, illness, etc. Our skills, talents, and gifts are controlled by these uncontrollable circumstances. Your ability doesn't matter here. You need the grace to be in a situation of utilizing your resources. So the biggest reality and fact about freedom is- it is neither safe nor fixed too. Freedom is always precarious on the existential bottom.
What to Do?
- Even if you are ready to work hard day and night, such situations can't be changed. You can just improve your mental state by letting go and try to be positive about your future.
- When fears and future insecurities traumatize you, find the shelter of the one who can control the future. Refill your faith in the mornings that do come after the dark of the night.
Unfulfilled Dreams: Another Type of Breaking Situations
Imagine a situation where you are young and want to become a professional dancer. If you have the freedom from your parent’s side of pursuing your passion and your destiny also brings an opportunity, then your freedom (of opting for your passion from your own choice) finds energy and vivacity in destiny. And destiny meets its meaning in that freedom. If you don’t have freedom, the destiny-driven opportunity dies.
“Freedom finds its vitality in destiny and destiny finds its significance in freedom.”
What to Appreciate?
Think about the above 'uncontrollable situations' and give a new point-of-view to your thought. Learn to appreciate the family and caring parents. In the case of choosing among emotions and dreams, don't choose one and leave the other, but find a brainy way. Think of how can you choose a destiny without becoming rebellious and without forsaking the teachings of your parents! Make them understand what your Dream matters to you. You neither kill their emotions nor your dreams. Make a midway and keep your bridge built. Then value the opportunity because it doesn’t knock on the door again and again. Passions develop when you get some extraordinary features in yourself. Value your gift, skill, or talent, which are like a bird who can’t explore without the wings of freedom.
Remember!
So when the situations are controllable on human capacity’s ground, keep the command of freedom in your own hands 'but' without disgracing elders. Never forget that for whatever purpose you oppose your elders, you can't get success without their blessings. Don’t let anyone else make a bounding shell for no reason but just for the barrier of thought gaps. Bridge them and then step ahead.
What to Make Them Realize?
You can make someone happy only if you on your own are happy. Nobody has the right to the stamp of success. You may get it; you may not get it too. What if you spend your years and do not get success after giving your 100% inputs? Imagine how heavy the weight will be of that when one faces the failure of an unfulfilled dream at the cost of his own dream. How depressing it would be — such a shell of helplessness.
It’s better to believe in your own dream and give that the tries as the failures don’t seem that bitter in this case. The failure indeed incorporates a satisfactory feeling of at least trying once in life for achieving your own goal.
What If Nothing Works?
Yes, the same opportunity might not come again to please you if you leave that, but who says that all the options and chances will also turn their faces? Life is all about a second chance because no man gets success without tasting the failure (whatsoever is the situation).
When someone says that you should do this or that, sit and analyze yourself and your ability. Choose a way on which you can walk. If they are your close ones and you cannot go ahead without their support, then do what is to be done. But simultaneously, never drop your dream. Who knows life might give you a surprise. So be ready for that moment. Don't drop on polishing your skills or talent for accomplishing your dream.
What Not To Do
Never blame yourself or anyone else for any bitter situation. Don't turn back all the time to go through the same pain again and again. Leave, let go, and move ahead so that you can reach the upcoming doors. Be hopeful and always be optimistic about tomorrow.
The Worst Case: Broken or Forced Dreams
Sometimes our situation doesn't allow us to pursue our dreams. Sometimes we leave our dreams for our close ones. But the worst case is when people impose their doubts on us and make us realize that we are not competent enough to meet our dream. We believe in them instead of believing in ourselves, dropping the confidence and faith in our own wings.
Such broken dreams and bitter experiences make a lifelong bounding shell of pain and frustration because it takes away your reason for living and the reasoning too. It becomes more trapping when it is replaced by someone else's dream.
“If the seed of a dream was being planted in someone else’s brain or heart’s land, that dream can never blossom at its peak in future if it is supposed to grow inside you.”
A dream of someone else, if cultivated in you, will be like a rose plant. The roses of satisfaction will be plucked and admired by the dreamer but your land will be left with the plant of thorns forever because that plant’s beauty, fragrance, and that pleasant essence were always the belongings of that dreamer. You play just a caretaker.
Your own dream is like an art. It pays you bucks or not, the wealth of satisfaction will go nowhere. It will keep you enriched in your own eyes.
Also, the forced dreams take away the opportunities of your art and expression too.
“The expression of an art is the greatest exemplar of freedom.”
If situations allow you to chase your dream and your beloved ones are with you, don't drop your confidence and hit your goal again and again until you find success.
Delayed or Pending Restoration
The Freedom Eaters
There are some situations that pass in time but not from memories. They leave you with some bitter and sticky feelings, such as:
- Disappointment
- Fear
- Insecurity
- Grudges
- Unforgiveness
- Pain of rejection
They don't go easily and bound one with the state of seeking:
- Pardon
- Strength
- Justice
These types of memories and emotions keep visiting a person, bounding him or her in a trap and leaving no clue to come out. Many people do not even realize that they are living with an ongoing traumatic situation. They become used to and comfortable with it and make such feelings a part of their life.
How to Know You Are Trapped?
Below are some symptoms and habits that you cultivate in such a case:
- Believing that there is no hope of a change
- The irritation in general behavior
- Short-tempered behavior
- Fear of taking new steps
- Cursing people
- Intolerance for even small mistakes of others
- No good feeling about your current life that seems to be stuck
What to Do?
- Make new friends
- Listen to good, happy music to cheer yourself up
- Keep some distance from sad songs, else they will enhance your mood
- Read good novels to change your perceptions
- Watch motivational movies
- Have faith in the judgment of God in this life and the after-life
- Forgive people to lose hold of grudges. Indeed bless them to free yourself. Remember, others' bad situations can't change your bad mood. Spread happiness and blessings around so that they can come back to you.
Behavioral Disorders
The following are the prime enemies of a person:
- Anger
- Temper
- Uncontrolled tongue
- Jealousy
- Pride
- Ego
What Do They Do?
Anger magnifies the chances of ruining your identity, image, and good aura. It increases the tendencies of killing and destroying. The wrong temperament hampers the smoothness and ease of living life. It mounts the probabilities of professionalism. An uncontrolled tongue and ego make one lose friends and belongingness. Jealousy destroys the person himself.
These behavioral termites make one hollow from inside. They spoil the roots of a person and gradually bind with the basic character. Soon it corners you among your relatives and peers. This is a shell that forms without alarming you, taking your freedom to choose a better behavior and peaceful surrounding.
What to Do?
Unfortunately, when it happens, we don't realize it on our own. People close to us and around us get to notice more than us. And when they try to make us realize, they start to come in our hit-list of bad people whom we dislike.
Learn to Make Corrections
How you take and respond to corrections is also an art. Deal with people and situations graciously. Those who criticize you are not always enemies. Sometimes they are those who care for you and long to see you well. Learn to be a sport and adapt to change and corrections for the betterment.
As soon as one notify you about your behavioral change, analyze yourself. Start to practice and control your temperament to get it to the right place.
Incompetency
Sometimes our inner freedom is not taken by others or the situations. We on our own mess with our life. The clutter occupies the space of your mind and stays there all the time giving you frustration and irritation. It tires you. Here you are some freedom eaters:
- Mismanagement in professional and personal life
- Lack of time management
- Indiscipline
- Unplanned and unorganized activities
- Unintentional errors
- Mismatched expectations
- Long sleep
- Wastage of time
Life seems easy and smooth only if our daily life is managed and organized. Otherwise, you do something and think of something else. For example:
- Thinking of unclean clothes while going to bed for sleeping because you didn't wash them on time and you have nothing to wear in the office for the next day.
- Thinking of groceries at the workplace because you didn't do the shopping and refill them on the weekend when you had time.
- Forgetting the things in the market because you didn't prepare any grocery list.
- Forgetting the date of the meeting, birthday, or other important events because you never schedule your days.
- Skipping important deals because you never make a ti-o-do-list.
- Morning fears because you woke up late.
- You make too heavy plans and impossible goals. As a result, you never meet your expectations.
Let's Sweep the Bugs from Lifestyle
Here are some tips to fix such inner-freedom eaters!
- Wake up early morning. When your day starts early, you remain early in all your tasks and emerge as a pro-active personality.
- Make your to-do list before going to bed. Add your important meetings and date to it.
- Keep a diary and pen in your kitchen, so that whenever you remember anything to shop for, just add that to the list so that you never forget anything in the market.
- Make realistic goals so that you can enjoy the joy and peace of meeting them too.
- Spare time for meditation, exercise, and workout so that your focus increases, and you do not commit unintentional errors.
- Save some 'Me Time' for yourself. Pursue your dreams and hobbies at this time. It will make you feel good about life. When you find time for your heart, you find life meaningful.
- Accept your errors gracefully and don't be too harsh on yourself. Have patience while improving your mistakes. Don't blame yourself or think 'you can't' because the practice can make you do anything. And it takes time.
Uninvited Blockers
There are some more different types of challenges that come uninvitedly and ruin your happiness, inner peace, and freedom. They are:
- Doubts
- Peer pressure
- Change in daily life, place, people around
- Failure in understanding the relationships and behaviors
An Eye-opener: What is Dignity and Our Aura?
“Your boundaries of freedom determine your dignity and your dignity determines your boundaries of freedom.”
How wide or disciplined our freedom boundaries are, builds our image among the people who live around us. When you stand in a circle of questions like- Do I have the freedom of hanging out late-night; should I give freedom to my cravings of smoking or drinking; would I have the freedom to risk my life and become a soldier; can I give freedom to my typing hands to abuse someone on a social networking site? Such questions make a circle around you and it’s up to you whether you want to cross that circle’s circumference or not. And interestingly, when you play this circle game in your mind, it reflects in your actions too and makes the same circle for others too. People see you in that circle of your rules and they also set their freedom boundaries as per your circle’s boundary. This whole invisible game decides the percentage of your dignity.
While living in the same society, the percentage of your dignity determined by you and others stays in the same range. But when you will go to another society, this percentage may vary. Maybe in a village, drinking is seen as a bad habit, but in some corporate parties, it is a status symbol nowadays; in cold countries, it is the need of the hour and an important liquid for survival.
The fact is- there is no standard dignity meter. If someone says our boundaries of freedom decide the percentage of our dignity, then mathematics fails in the above examples.
What to Realize?
You cannot always get a good percentage of dignity in every group. While living in the same boundary of freedom, people will give you different percents. You can’t stop them from being judgmental.
What to Do?
- Whatever boundaries of freedom you set for different circumstances, never forget to keep your dignity up in God’s and your own eyes. When you and your spirit will be sure that you are following a righteous path, you will find yourself free from worldly bounding shells.
- Once you are sure that you are aligned with the righteous path and living one accord with the Word of God, don't get oppressed under peer pressure or the care of the world for performing wrong practices. Leave the doubts and choose the right path.
Pre-determined Identity
Don’t Compromise or Accept the Settlement Just for the Sake of Saving Your Pre-determined Identity
As much as we grow, the freedom of our actions and decisions keeps going into a redefining process.
Now here comes a sad reality to face that most of us feel frightened to face the real ‘ourselves’ in front of the world. When we play the role of a kid in our life, we present ourselves the way we are. As soon as we grow, we begin to see our presence tied into the shells of a system, an image, a character, a role, an identity, and so on.
This shell’s walls throw an echoing command 24/7 “Do this; don’t do that; people will get judgmental if I will behave this way; that beloved one will feel ashamed of me if I’ll perform that way; If I’ll do it, would my parents no longer feel proud of, and so on”. These questions hit the brain continuously, making the shell stronger day by day. The number of years of our lives increases; so does the number of shells.
We know who and what we are but remain scared of whether people will accept us this way or not; in fact, more than their acceptance, we are afraid of others’ reactions on our changed (though real) side. That unknown probable reaction of our so-called society, beloved ones, and others around us is so terror-producing that the thought only shakes us from the roots.
The pressure of maintaining our predetermined identity (in other’s eyes) is so high that we never dare to take even the first step for being ourselves. Here we behave very sure that people will not adjust to the real us. We not only start to adjust ourselves but also the definition of our freedom.
Brainstorm
People don’t have only one job of analyzing us. Everyone is tangled in his/her own shell and worldly webs. When they see a change around in surrounding or people, they just get a thought, give their views, and move ahead. Over time, they settle with a new perception too. Now, this perception is good, neutral, or bad about the change, this depends on their own mindset, principles, conduct, attitude, and adaptability. You or anyone cannot do anything with that. How someone’s thought process works, differs from person to person. Just like our faces, our behavioral identities are also different. And it is okay; it is normal. There is no need for identical persons; this is how God has designed people in this world. Yes, there are twins too in this world, but they also can’t be necessarily the same in every aspect such as intelligence, talent, skills, health conditions, activities, etc.
You are also unique, so if your interest, goals, skills, attribute, appearance, or perceptions don’t match with others, it’s not a problem or something abnormal. You deserve to preserve your own original identity. And if you have not taken a step for that yet, "now" is the time.
Belongingness
Sometimes, Belong to No Human, No City
“If you want to know yourself, rethink how you would like to live and what would you love to do when nobody belongs to you.” (Neither relatives nor friends nor neighbors nor anyone else to judge you except your almighty.)
Once you will get the reply, you will also get the way in which your freedom will remain intact.
If you want to opt for the right way in confusion or wilderness, get directions from a holy book. It will not only clear the blurriness of your path but also give you peace while walking on those new roads.
Remember Yourself and Forget Yourself at the Same Time
Remember you are the child of God. Forget your worldly identity. Feel fearless in your God’s name and enjoy the freedom.
Recall and remember yourself by revisiting the roots of your nature and the very you. Shake hands with your real inner-self. It will clear your ways where you will be able to breathe with ease and freeness.
It is good to take suggestions from others or guidelines from elders, but never forget that nobody else knows you better than yourself. People make their suggestions as per their own understanding and experiences. They can give you a new side but can’t read your heart and its wish. Only you know where
your heart will find peace. So listen to everyone for letting them share their learning and lessons, but make a decision as per your own satisfaction. It is imperative to save the freedom of your breath.
The Bottom Line
“Freedom lies in being unique, being real, being you!”
And always remember…
“The beauty of a flying bird is not in going high in the sky; it is in flying free as per her wish.”
In the same way, the beauty of life is not in going high in other’s eyes; it is in living free as per own rules.
